SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
Late January · Boulder, Colorado · Eleven Days · Since 1978
Sundance is eleven days of independent film at the end of January, and from 2027 it is held in Boulder, Colorado. It ran in Park City, Utah, for forty-five years before that.
Some eighty-five thousand people come. What premieres here reaches everybody else some months later.
The Move
Park City held its last Sundance in January 2026.
The festival had outgrown the town. A ski resort of eight thousand cannot absorb eighty-five thousand visitors without the traffic on Main Street becoming the thing everyone talks about, and the theatres there were shrinking rather than growing. Boulder won a bidding contest against several cities, Park City among them, with thirty-four million dollars of tax incentives across ten years.
Screenings are spread across the town: a theatre on the main street, two school auditoriums, a chautauqua hall, and several rooms on the university campus.
There is a symmetry nobody planned. Robert Redford, who founded the thing, was a student at Colorado in the mid-fifties. He died in September 2025, a few months before the last Park City edition.
The History
It began in Salt Lake City in September 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival, an initiative of the state film commission to draw film-makers to Utah. Redford chaired the board.
It lost money for two years. In 1980 Sydney Pollack suggested moving it to a ski resort in winter, on the theory that people would come for the snow and stay for the films. He was right.
In the early Park City years Redford stood outside the Egyptian Theatre selling two-dollar tickets and pulling passers-by in off the street to fill seats. The Sundance Institute took over the running of it in 1984, and the name changed in 1991.
What came out of it: Sex, Lies and Videotape. Reservoir Dogs. Napoleon Dynamite. Little Miss Sunshine. The early careers of Soderbergh, Tarantino, Coogler and Zhao.
What to Know
The first six days hold the world premieres. What follows is repeat screenings, by which point the industry has gone home.
Passes and packages go on sale in the autumn, and the programme is not announced until December. Nobody knows what they are buying tickets to when they buy them, which is rather the point.
The gala falls on the first Friday.
The mistake is going for the famous faces. They are there for two days and they are in rooms you are not in. The reason to go is that you will see six films nobody has an opinion about yet, and form your own before anyone tells you what to think.
The Court
Sundance is not the Court’s own. Passes, tickets to premieres and places at the gala are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. The first Boulder year is untested, and the Court will report on it.
